Forty years on from John Carpenter’s classic slasher film, David Gordon Green’s latest reanimation of the title is functional but enjoyable
It’s Halloween 2018 in Haddonfield, Illinois, and the time-honoured festivities are in full swing. At the start of the second episode of the revived franchise there’s already a body impaled on railings, and a cop (Will Patton) gushing blood on the ground. Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) – horror cinema’s original Final Girl, now Final Grandmother – is being rushed to hospital, and her house is in flames. But indestructible killer Michael Myers has decided to make a night of it, and is out there armed with a firefighter’s axe, axing firefighters.
Forty years after John Carpenter made the defining slasher movie, director David Gordon Green has made a creditable stab, as it were, at reanimating the title. Green is an occasional indie auteur (George Washington, Prince Avalanche) who leads a double life as a mainstream stalwart, and showed in his 2018 Halloween reboot that he’s more than competent at straight genre thrills. Writing again with Danny McBride, here joined by Scott Teems, Green offers a functional but enjoyably efficient follow-up. It kicks in only minutes after the events of the previous episode, and pretty much follows a straight line, apart from brief flashbacks to 1978, with even a passable Donald Pleasence lookalike on hand to lend authenticity.
